Since July 2014, under Canada's Health of Animals Act in support of swine traceability, both the shipper and receiver of swine are required to report animal movements to PigTrace Canada within seven days.

Jeff Clark, the Manager of PigTrace Canada an initiative of the Canadian Pork Council, says the primary goal of traceability is to have a ready dataset that can be used trace back animal health emergencies or food safety issues.

Jeff Clark-PigTrace Canada

We haven't had a whole lot of disease response.

We have had some Seneca Valley virus investigations.

The system was used for that.

PED outbreaks have been in various regions throughout Canada so we have had some use there and also a couple of minor food safety tracebacks when there's been suspected contaminants in the animals.

Unfortunately the Chief Vet's Office in Manitoba hasn't used PigTrace as the first step go to for their PED response.

We have compared it to what they've found on the ground, that being phone calls with the farms involved and paper records and so on.

We've reminded them, let's have a look at PigTrace and it essentially matches what they've found through their investigations so I'm still trying to encourage animal health officials all across Canada to have a look at PigTrace.

Let's look there first and let's see how the information flows and how quickly we can pull information out.

There's a variety of different ways we can investigate, so unfortunately it hasn't been the first stop for this latest outbreak of PED in Manitoba.

Mr Clark says, in this latest PED outbreak, the PigTrace records matched what was found on the ground which gives him confidence in the value of the system.